Friday, March 7, 2014

Several organizations across the world have had to regret for not utilizing the services of ethical or white hat hackers to test their internal and external infrastructure for vulnerability scanning.

Recently a large financial service company was the victim of a phishing attack and had to undergo with a substantial chunk of its information being compromised. The company would have saved the crores, if spent a few lakhs on deploying the services of Ethical Hackers.

In an Interview, Dr. Anup Girdhar (CEO – Sedulity Solutions & Technologies) said, ‘there are various reasons due to which companies are little skeptical in deploying the services of ethical hackers- low awareness about the concept of IT Auditing or Penetration Testing, the perception of high cost of services and un-comfortability to share the infrastructure policies implemented by their technical team’. However, each organization should take the professional and expert services in order to get their internal technical policies audited for better productivity, through third party IT auditing organization like ‘Sedulity Solutions & Technologies’, etc. who have good track record for delivering their services to various Corporate and Govt. clients.

As, the demand for such services is rising, each organization should organize ‘Cyber Security & Ethical Hacking’ Training programmes for their technical and management teams or should recommend them to learn such technologies from some good and reputed universities in India like ‘IGNOU and TMV-Pune’. Among the top IT countries in the world, the need for Ethical Hackers is huge in India, as the percentage for Cyber Crimes, Cyber Terrorism, Data theft, Defamation, Cyber Stalking, etc. have seen exponential growth in the past few years, Dr. Girdhar adds.

According to the recently released National Cyber Security Policy by Ministry of IT, Govt. of India, there is a need of almost 500,000 Cyber Security Professionals who can put their best for securing the most important information from this Cyber Space. Currently the rough estimate of Cyber Security Experts in India is about 30,000. To deliver 500,000 Cyber Security Experts in 3-4 years, each candidate who works on computer and internet should learn such technology from reputed institutions like ‘Sedulity’ as it offer more practical oriented training modules which helps the candidates to get good placement opportunities as well.

The "Awareness across the US and Europe is comparatively much higher than in India as a lot more information related to Cyber Security is to be shared within the industry. It is recommended that organizations should focus on live Penetration testing or IT Auditing instead to rely more on security certifications. Moreover, special kind of training which is related to ‘Cyber Laws’ should also be provided so that each candidate who learn such technology is aware that if he try to misuse the knowledge would have to go for certain punishments or penalties or both which are applicable under ‘Indian IT Amendment Act-2008’.